In Iran, when a family faces a decision of consequence – a marriage, a journey, a question whose answer refuses to arrive through reason – someone opens the Divan of Hafez at random, places a finger on the page, and reads the verse aloud. This practice, known as fal-e Hafez, is not superstition in any simple sense. It is an act of faith in the idea that poetry, if it is good enough and old enough, contains more wisdom than the person consulting it can access through deliberation alone. Hafez, who lived in fourteenth-century Shiraz and whose collected poems have never gone out of print in the seven centuries since his death, is trusted in Iran the way an oracle might be trusted – not because he predicts the future but because his language is precise enough to illuminate whatever situation the reader brings to it.

This relationship between a culture and its poetry – intimate, daily, operating at the level of domestic ritual rather than academic study – has no real equivalent in the contemporary West. English speakers may admire Shakespeare or quote Dickinson, but they do not open their collected works at random to seek guidance on whether to accept a job offer or marry a particular person. Persians do this with Hafez. They have been doing it for centuries. And the practice reveals something essential about the function of poetry in Persian civilization: it is not a literary art set apart from life. It is a technology for navigating life’s deepest uncertainties, and its authority derives not from institutional endorsement but from the accumulated experience of millions of readers who have found, in Hafez’s fourteenth-century couplets, a precision adequate to their own contemporary crises.

The Ghazal: A Form Built for Secrets

The ghazal – the lyric form most associated with Persian poetry – is, at the structural level, a form designed to hold contradiction without resolving it. Each couplet, or beyt, is a self-contained unit of meaning. The couplets within a single ghazal are linked by rhyme and refrain but not, in the Western sense, by narrative progression or argumentative logic. A ghazal does not build to a conclusion. It circles its subject, approaching from different angles, and the subject it circles most persistently is longing – for the beloved, for the divine, for a condition of wholeness that the poem simultaneously invokes and declares unattainable.

This structure has consequences for any novelist who takes Persian poetry seriously as a model. Western fiction, particularly the novel, tends toward resolution. Events lead to other events. Questions receive answers. Characters develop, which in narrative terms usually means they change in response to what happens to them. The ghazal proposes a different relationship between a work of art and its subject. It suggests that the deepest truths are approached not through sequential development but through repeated, varied encounter – that you understand longing not by tracing its arc from origin to resolution but by inhabiting it from multiple vantage points, each couplet a window onto the same unresolvable condition.

For a novel concerned with secrets – with information that characters possess but cannot share, with silences that shape relationships more powerfully than speech – the ghazal’s structural logic offers something invaluable. It provides a model for how a long narrative can sustain unresolved tension without the reader experiencing that tension as a failure of plot. The secret does not need to be revealed in order for the novel to feel complete. It needs to be circled, illuminated from different angles, made present through the quality of attention the prose brings to the spaces around it. This is what Hafez does with longing. It is what a novel can do with silence.

Hafez and the City of Shiraz

Hafez is inseparable from his city. He was born in Shiraz, lived his entire life there, and is buried in a garden – the Hafezieh – that remains one of Iran’s most visited sites. Shiraz itself occupies a unique position in Persian cultural geography. It is not the political capital (that has been Tehran since the late eighteenth century) and it is not the commercial centre (Isfahan, with its grand bazaar and bridges, has historically claimed that role). Shiraz is the poetic capital – the city most associated with Persian literature, with gardens, with wine (before the revolution, Shiraz produced Iran’s most celebrated vintages), and with a particular quality of light that poets across centuries have attempted to describe and that visitors consistently report being unprepared for.

To name a character Shiraz, then, is not simply to give her a Persian name. It is to place her within a specific tradition – the tradition of the city that produced Hafez and Saadi, that gave its name to a grape variety cultivated across the world, that functions in Persian consciousness as a symbol of beauty, poetry, and the particular form of civilized pleasure that Persian culture has always valued. A character named Shiraz carries the weight of that tradition whether or not she has visited the city, whether or not she reads Persian, whether or not she understands why her mother chose this name rather than another. The name is an inheritance, and like all inheritances in Persian culture, it operates partly through what is spoken and partly through what is left for the recipient to discover on her own.

Rumi, Saadi, and the Persistence of Persian Verse

Western readers most often encounter Persian poetry through Rumi, whose thirteenth-century mystical verses have become, in translation, among the most widely read poems in the English language. Rumi’s popularity in the West is deserved – his poems achieve a directness of spiritual expression that transcends cultural boundaries – but it can also distort Western understanding of the broader Persian poetic tradition. Rumi is one voice within a civilization that has produced poets continuously for over a thousand years, and his particular register – ecstatic, mystical, oriented toward the dissolution of the self in divine love – represents one possibility within a tradition that also encompasses Saadi’s worldly wisdom, Khayyam’s philosophical skepticism, Attar’s narrative mysticism, and Forough Farrokhzad’s twentieth-century revolution in poetic voice.

Saadi, Hafez’s predecessor in Shiraz by a century, wrote the Golestan – a collection of stories and poems whose opening line is inscribed at the entrance to the United Nations: “The children of Adam are limbs of each other, having been created of one essence.” Saadi’s sensibility is more didactic than Hafez’s, more concerned with ethical conduct in the world, but his prose achieves a balance of precision and warmth that remains a model for Persian literary style. Where Hafez circles his subject, Saadi approaches it directly but with such courtesy that the directness never feels aggressive. For a novelist, Saadi demonstrates that clarity and depth are not opposed – that a sentence can be immediately comprehensible and still carry meaning that reveals itself only on rereading.

Forough Farrokhzad, writing in the 1950s and 1960s, broke the Persian poetic tradition open from the inside. Her poems introduced a female subjectivity that the classical tradition, for all its sophistication, had largely excluded. She wrote about desire from a woman’s perspective with a frankness that scandalized Iranian society and a formal beauty that made the scandal impossible to dismiss. Her early death in 1967, at thirty-two, cut short a body of work that was already reshaping Persian literature, and her influence on subsequent Iranian writers – particularly women – is difficult to overstate. She demonstrated that the Persian poetic tradition was not a museum but a living language, capable of accommodating experiences and perspectives that its classical practitioners had not imagined.

The Double Language of Persian Poetry

One of the defining characteristics of Persian poetry – and one of the reasons it functions so effectively as a model for fiction about secrets – is its systematic use of double meaning. The beloved addressed in a ghazal may be a human lover, the divine, a patron, or the abstract concept of beauty itself. Wine may refer to actual wine, to spiritual intoxication, to forbidden knowledge, or to the courage required to speak truth in the presence of power. The garden may be an earthly garden in Shiraz, the garden of paradise, or the interior landscape of the poet’s consciousness. These meanings do not compete. They coexist, and the reader’s task is not to determine which meaning is “correct” but to hold all of them simultaneously – to understand that the poem’s richness depends on the irreducibility of its imagery to a single interpretive frame.

Persian poetry taught me that a sentence can mean two things at once and that neither meaning diminishes the other. This is also what silence does in a family.

This double language is not evasion. It is precision of a kind that single-meaning discourse cannot achieve. When Hafez writes about wine, he is writing about all the things wine can signify, and the poem’s power comes from the reader’s willingness to let those significations resonate simultaneously rather than collapsing them into a single interpretation. For a novelist working with characters who love each other across political and cultural divides, who carry secrets that are simultaneously personal and geopolitical, who inhabit identities that mean different things in different contexts, this principle is not ornamental. It is structural. The novel, like the ghazal, must hold multiple meanings at once, and it must trust the reader to move between them without demanding that the text declare which one is primary.

Poetry as Inheritance

In Persian households – in Tehran, in the diaspora, in the Israeli apartments where Nowruz is still observed – poetry is not studied. It is absorbed. Children hear Hafez before they can read him. They learn to recognize the rhythms of the ghazal before they understand its content. And this early, pre-verbal exposure creates a relationship to language that persists even when the language itself begins to fade – when the grandchildren speak Hebrew or English or French, when the Divan of Hafez sits on a shelf beside books in other languages, when the act of fal-e Hafez becomes something the grandmother does and the granddaughter watches with a mixture of affection and incomprehension.

But the incomprehension is not complete. Something transfers. The granddaughter may not read Persian, but she has grown up in a household where language was understood to carry more meaning than its surface content – where a poem opened at random was trusted to speak to the specific situation of the reader, where words were valued for their capacity to hold contradiction, where silence was treated not as the absence of communication but as one of its most potent forms. These are not Persian ideas in any exclusive sense. But they are ideas that Persian poetry embodies with particular clarity, and a person raised in their proximity carries them forward even when the specific poems have been forgotten.

This is the deepest sense in which Echoes of Shiraz is a novel shaped by Persian poetry. Not because it quotes Hafez or structures its chapters as ghazals – it does neither – but because its understanding of what language can do, of how silence functions, of the way meaning multiplies when a single image is allowed to resonate across contexts, is rooted in a poetic tradition that has been teaching these principles for seven hundred years. The novel is prose. But its prose remembers poetry the way a character named Shiraz remembers a city she has never seen: not as knowledge, but as resonance – a vibration inherited from a source she is still learning to identify.